New Changeset display

The OpenStreetMap web site was updated today. When you view the history tab, you’ll now see a map with bounding boxes shown for recent changesets in the area. Hovering over the changeset will highlight the bounding box, and vice-versa.

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7 thoughts on “New Changeset display”

Cool!
Is this incorporating OWL (by Matt?), or just using inspiration from it. I had heard there were plans for OWL to be put on the history tab.

The map box is really long and big, which is horrible on a netbook. Could it please be the size it is on the user pages? You might say I should get a bigger monitor, but I did say please and there might be other people who aren’t so privileged with certain hardware sizes.

The map box is interactive. It would probably good to have a ‘view history for area now shown’, or ‘update history list’ at the bottom of it. Hopefully this makes sense.

+1 for live updates based on the adjacent map’s view. Otherwise it’s not a particularly useful change for this user.

Also, the “Big” label has vanished. This was quite useful to show changesets that were very probably not of interest to me. Ideally there’d be an option to hide those. Would it be too much load to check if any items in the changeset are in the current bbox?

Perhaps if work is being done on the history tab then someone could look at fixing the URL that defaults to the global changesets address until after the map has finished loading when it gets updated with the viewport link? The hyperlink could be set much earlier during page load by looking at the querystring search parameter to prevent excess global changeset requests, as often happens when I want to view changesets for a given area quickly after a page loads (in Firefox).

This is not incorporating OWL (yet) no. It’s simply a bit of javascript to display a map against the pre-existing changeset display. OWL is an entirely different back-end system. The idea of incorporating that would be to solve the problem you and many other people complain about. The history display currently includes many globe-spanning changesets which actually do not touch any elements into the view area. Every changeset has a bounding box, and this view simply does an intersection calculation on that. Meanwhile Matt’s OWL system finds a way of actually listing changesets which touch elements in an bbox… but it’s not easily integrated into the existing rails app.

I think Mikel’s built this feature with his separate Kibera install in mind, where there’s no such problems, hence he’s also decided to drop the ‘BIG’ messages. But could be wrong.

@Pink Duck I had a quick look in trac, but can’t see that reported anyway. You should add a ticket.

I’m trying to answer your question here, but as Richard says, this is not the best channel for technical discussions.

I didn’t drop the BIG messages, TomH did. I want them back, I think it’s a good interim, if we can get a good design. Really there are three kinds of things to indicate on each changeset: big, friendship, bot. The trick is to do this unobtrusively. If someone could mockup something good, I’d implement immediately.